I flagged this on Twitter before President Trump started flogging it. But I’m not at all surprised that he did. Because, somewhat to my surprise, it revealed that Facebook seems still to be committed to lying, albeit now more artfully, about its role in the 2016 election and more broadly as a channel of choice for propaganda and misinformation.

When I first heard the alert that Mueller had indicted a group of Russian nationals for crimes tied to interference in the 2016 US election, it to me seemed relatively unremarkable. We know, or think we know, this happened. We know there are potential crimes connected to the interference. So my first thought was that Mueller was simply checking this box as part of the process of building out his case. Of course, the indictments contained a great deal of information than I suspected, much of which you can see discussed in our team’s coverage over the course of the afternoon.

I annotate these documents when I read them, to try to make sense of them. So I wanted to share with you passages that struck me as particularly notable or ones that suggested more was afoot than was included in the indictment itself.

The other indictment from Special Counsel Robert Mueller today was also a surprise. A plea agreement had already been reached, and a plea entered in federal court in DC. That all happened earlier this week. Not a peep.

A few months back I got into a minor public spat about the failings of so-called “data journalism.” I erred to the extent that I spoke loosely about data journalism in general as opposed to misuses of it or sloppy and lazy uses of it, which the example I noted clearly amounted to. One might generally describe this abuse of the form as clever people using numbers to lecture people about elements of human experience the clever lecturing people either don’t understand or think their cleverness gives them a pass on trying to understand. One element of that example was a study that showed that mass shootings account for only a very tiny subset of the total number of deaths in this country from firearms every year. This is true (probably obvious to almost all of us if we give it some thought) and also largely beside the point.

This isn’t new news, not a new revelation. But with more and more voluminous information coming in daily, it is worth revisiting the point. Whether or not the President obstructed justice recently isn’t a factual question. That one is 100% clear. It’s really a legal and constitutional one.

Good morning, and happy Friday. Congress has concluded DACA negotiations without reaching a deal after the White House intervened to undermine them. The House and Senate are out until Feb. 26, and it looks set to be a slow day in D.C. Of course, it’s risky to say things like that these days.

We’ve discussed it many times. Most of us realize it: one of the great ironies, and perhaps tragedies of the “gun control” debate is that it has been backed into such limited and incremental policy prescriptions that those prescriptions can be reasonably derided by “gun rights” advocates as barely worth the trouble or hardly of any use. We know that no one restriction would prevent every needless tragedy. But together, a number of them, interweaving and compounding each other, would prevent or limit many massacres and bloodbaths. More importantly, this whole logic is not one we apply to any other problem of criminality or public health. Our entire counter-terrorism policy is based on no silver bullets but a series of traversable but still consequential obstacles, the aim of which is to disrupt, make more complicated or reveal conspiracies. We have collectively made it mainly too difficult to hatch plots to commandeer airliners or even effectively communicate to plan major operations at all. So radicals are reduced to largely ineffectual (but still often deadly) DIY kitchenware based bombs and trucks. That’s a good thing.